April 20, 2011

“Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

Did you have a flash — reading that — that he's like his mother, and we, the taxpayers, are like the grandparents? We'll come through. We'll provide the floor through which the country cannot crash.

But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of un conditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

Please, America. Don't cramp my style. I'm a unique spirit, here to give that special gift that I have brought into the world. It's all for the best, if you'll be that floor.

Is Obama like his mother in his personal life? I don't think so. Maybe his biographies imply differently, but he seems to me to have pursued social and financial security overall.

That's a good point.

Barack Obama is not a hippy type, married to two women of a race different than he, nor would he ever have thought to apply for food stamps to support his family, whilst trudging along in life, trying to finish his Ph.D..

Clearly, he is far more like his father, who wrapped his Cadillac around a tree after having had drinks, as usual, at a famous foreign hotel's bar in Nairobi, where all the civil servants and moneyed hung out.

Before Barack's pants leg's were creased and natty, Barack Sr's slim elegant frame had creased trousers. No sign of Stanley Ann's pudgy Midwestern fashionless sense on her only son.

Mind you, how much Michelle Obama influenced her husband, and his desire to live in Hyde Park in a mansion, remains to be explored.

A savvy president would say "You know these are tough times for Americans. And almost everyday I see and hear stories where families and friends looked out for and helped each other when the need arose".

Forget the safety net, if it hadn't been for his grandmother, whom he eventually threw under a very crowded bus, he would not have grown up to be the spoiled, pampered snob he is.

"He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy"

Does he think they can control it? Hell, my mother was chronically, severely depressed her whole life from Cushing's; if there was a way to get out from under it, I don't doubt she would have jumped at it.

PS I think Ann's point isn't quite correct. It isn't that he thinks the adults in the country will save him; he thinks he can wring out whatever he wants from them by either inveigling or intimidation.

"Please, America. Don't cramp my style. I'm a unique spirit, here to give that special gift that I have brought into the world. It's all for the best, if you'll be that floor."

Perhaps some of this mockery is perceptive.

But I'm reminded again of Obama's painstakingly created, personal narrative, which virtually ignores the maternal side of the family in favor of his nearly totally absent father. I know some here would attribute that self-creation to political convenience, but I think it's more than that. If mom's a bit of an embarrassment, then why not tout the seemingly down-to-earth and hardworking grandparents? Having read much of "Dreams from My Father," I still don't get the fascination with dad.

This part is odd:When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. “I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Of fice and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my﻿ decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid.”

Mind you, how much Michelle Obama influenced her husband, and his desire to live in Hyde Park in a mansion, remains to be explored.

Haha Vic. A joke.

Explored by whom?

This is the guy we can't even know what his college transcripts are or where his birth certificate is or what passport he travelled with to Pakistan or what the heck a CT social security number has to do with him, or where his Illinois records are or what on and off campus groups he socialized with Bill Ayers with in NYC.

I think Michelle played a huge part in his Dreams book thingey too -- while they were in Bali or afterwards -- but who is going to dig and ask the hard qyestions?

The bottom line is, is that his mothers decisions in life, her choices in men and in that insecurity, shaped Erkle to follow people he thought could wield power on his behalf and to shun those that were of no value to him. Alinksi, Ayers, Rezko, Wright, Frank Marshal Davis, Alice Palmer, Dorhn, McKnight, Greg Galluzo, and his raving Communist/Marxist father, "All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I tried to take as my own" were those people that shaped his life, this privileged Hawaiian youth transforms into a radical Marxist by the very people I've named above.

His mother's insecurities at life and in men visa vie her ideology set him up, which in turn has fucked all of us over.

I also think Lolo (Obama's stepfather) is an interesting character in this article, but there is no discussion of any interaction or influence that this man had with his stepson, even though he was married to Ann from the time Obama was 3 until he was 19. Is Lolo still alive?

I went to the movies for the first time in about twenty years yesterday. I hate to sit in a movie with people talking and shouting at the screen and my TV is almost as big as most multiplexes today. But a friend of ours took us to Astoria to the Kauffman Studios and it was great. Plus it was empty which is always a plus.

Anywho we saw this movie called "Hanna" about a girl who was trained by her parent to come back to get revenge against an Evil America.

Having read much of "Dreams from My Father," I still don't get the fascination with dad.

Second that.

I work with people in mental health and this has always been an incredibly opaque thing for me.

He saw his father ONCE when he was 10.

By that time he had been Barry Soetoro for a couple years.

What on earth was that about?

His father was a bigamist. And then went off and married another white American woman and had two kids by her in Kenya ... and he writes a "love song" to him? There are words for what his father was and did, and I won't bother to put them in print.

BHO Sr. was his biological father (though there could be serious doubt about this) but appeared relationally to be zero connected there. (Aside -- I think the Kenyan grandmother has Barry mixed up with the other bi-racial boys' birth. Not hard. All those white women look alike.)

I do appreciate Obama's connection with his girls (the elder more than the younger, I think) and his ability to at least appear to be a dad for them, given his incredibly lousy and bizarre choices his mother made in men, and his odd grandfather.

And his mother finishing her PhD on Indonesian blacksmithing doesn't impress me at all, given that she left her kids behind here and there over all those years. He is gracious, but also can't be too honest here (perhaps not an appropriate forum).

Kids grow up too fast to miss them while they are doing it. She lost more than she gained. Sad.

Anywho we saw this movie called "Hanna" about a girl who was trained by her parent to come back to get revenge against an Evil America.

More grrrrl power. Why are the feminists up in their unshorn masses about things like Barbie's measurements, when what they should really be doing is dispelling these sorts of movies as an unrealistic, unachievable stereotype for women?

So now they are romanticizing the mother because the father and the 'Dreams' would not work this time and anyway, all the AAs are in the bag. It is a shame he does not have a second book for this time around on his white mom to stop the white exodus. So the presstitutes (to borrow from another poster) are writing about his mom on his behalf as if it is some novel. BTW, his sister has a book out on his mom the title of which is plagiarized. I guess it runs in the family, plagiarism, that is.

What I am after is that I think some of Obama is explained by that he thinks of the Presidency as a larger version of when he was a "community organizer" in South Chicago and trying to get something for his clients out of City Hall.

That statement by the President reminds me of when Speaker Pelosi said, "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance"?

Go read some of the fawning comments appended to that piece under comment "highlights":

She was a trail blazer for women, a remarkable woman alone in the world. I empathize and relate deeply to her early life. lizrs from St. Louis

Not one of the highlighted comments is negative or critical of Dunham. Then click on "show all comments" and you see that NYT commenters are as fair and mentally unbalanced as we Althouse commenters are.

Imagine if Althouse instituted a "highlights" feature for her comment section?

I don't have any notion why CT, but he's nearly the same age as I am and back then you didn't get a SSN at birth like you do now. You didn't have to get one at all until you wanted to get a job. I got mine when I was 16.

Lets be honest. Barrack is the biggest Affirmative action baby ever. There's no way some white dude with his resume and named "Obama" would ever got elected POTUS.

I actually like how he discussed his Mom. I doubt he was so forgiving when young. I doubt I could be so forgiving. I mean geez, what a Flake, and I'm sure she was a loving parent - when she actually spared the time to be with him.

I'm so used to being able to use the Kindle's text-to-speech that I started to get up in the middle of reading this article to go finish loading the dishwasher. Then I realized that there was no place to click to have the computer read the rest of the article to me while I worked.

Obama is a dad to his girls. say what you will about his weirdo parents, but he fulfills his most important responsibility.

I'm not going to be like those imbeciles who can't see any good in Bush, also a great dad and all around decent human being. Obama may be a horrible president, but he's there for his girls. He got that instinct from somewhere, perhaps his grandparents.

All those sad fools insisting Bush is a cokehead have never explained their evidence. But Obama noted he was almost a junkie, and he admitted to using hard drugs. I guess it's one of those rules that don't apply to democrats.

Honestly, the left wouldn't be in the sorry shape they are in if they let their leaders fool them with demonizing Republicans all the time.

I don't know that the raw facts of a person's life tell you all that much about the person. This is especially true when those facts and those people exist outside of our frame of reference. Indonesian blacksmiths? Very difficult to fit that enthusiasm into any kind of stereotype. I read the article and don't have a clue as to who his mother was. She seems adventurous and careless, conscientious and negligent, caring and abandoning. But perhaps a child read none of those things into her bahvior.....There are a lot of puzzles at the center of Obama's existence. It says something good about him that he turned out as well as he did. I'm no fan of his policies, but he does seem to have forged (feigned?) an efficient engine from gears that do not mesh......I can understand his fascination with his missing father. If you were missing a leg, I think you would probably think about that missing leg much more than your actual leg. You would probably have fantasies about football scholarships if only you had two legs.

Go read some of the fawning comments appended to that piece under comment "highlights":

She was a trail blazer for women, a remarkable woman alone in the world. I empathize and relate deeply to her early life. lizrs from St. Louis

Not one of the highlighted comments is negative or critical of Dunham. Then click on "show all comments" and you see that NYT commenters are as fair and mentally unbalanced as we Althouse commenters are.

Imagine if Althouse instituted a "highlights" feature for her comment section?

Perhaps if she'd been a bit better organized she wouldn't have shtupped the (married) African student, gotten knocked up, contracted a bigamous marriage, and then got dumped because of the greater attractions of Harvard.

Why can't he get in touch with the Kansas side of his identity? Trade and immigration are hammering white working- and middle-class Americans, undermining a whole way of life. This is the class, exemplified by his grandmother, certainly not by his mother, to say nothing of his father, who bailed him out. Yet their interests only get lip service on his trips to Ohio. He listens to bankers when it comes to actual policy making.